Clarion XR 2420 Four Channel Amplifier

Product Details
Manufacturer: Clarion
Website: Clarion
Typical Selling price: £149.99, £139.99 on line
WHAT IT IS
Four channel amplifier made to a typically Clarion-understatedly high standard, with real world, actual scientific specifications and high quality components. It has four channels of 60W at a ‘˜normal’ 4 Ohms load but if you give it 2 Ohms speakers to drive, it will produce 4 x90W or else two paired channels of 180 watts. Each pair of channels can be selected to go through a high pass or low pass crossover to thus avoid sending deep bass to your component speakers or keep the treble out of a woofer system. Maybe as part of using all four channels bridged into two, then driving a dual voice coil subwoofer.
You can connect by two sets of RCA line out signals from your headunit or you can simply use speaker level inputs via special supplied connectors that you join the speaker outputs of your radio to. The amp has oversized internal power capacitors and also the bass boost system has two levels and uses a narrower ‘˜Q’ factor as well as being 5Hz higher-up than the standard 45Hz. These are symptoms of ‘˜posh’. It even states the power figure ‘˜conditions’ as well as offering up specs for Intermodulation Distortion, Signal-To-Noise ratio and Channel Separation. Go see if other makers even OFFER those, and compare. These are factual, not fanciful specs and deeply respectable ones for the really low price asked.
Shiny

In A Nutshell
A delicious slab of black anodised aluminium with a simply excellent class A/B amp inside that benefits from 21st century improvements in technology. So as well as design smarts and cute plastic injection-moulded end caps that hide the cables’ installations, the channels each get a 30Hz to 300Hz crossover that can be switched to be high or low pass. The output is clean and sweet and could be used for sound quality competitions, in my opinion, despite the ‘˜only’ 80dB signal to noise ratio quote. Clean, sweet and neat.
The SCORES
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 9
Power Output 8
Features 8
Build Quality 9
Value For Money 10
Happily recommended by Talk Audio

Editor Review : Clarion XR 2420 Four Channel Amplifier
This is going to sound really odd, but I do tend to have emotional experiences reviewing Clarion stuff! This was quite funny here but the actual extract you need is: ‘ the experience was so bloody awesomely good, so exciting to realise this was indeed a State Of The Art piece that all of my mad obsession welled up and my eyes filled with tears. I was far too embarrassed to admit what furtive pleasures I had been experiencing in my office but after half an hour of the middle of new Years day 2008 I turned it down and off and went downstairs to apologise to my family for abandoning them. Apparently I look a bit odd with glassy eyes and every hair on my body standing on end.’ But today, with this amp, it was different..
First, the too-stupid-and-funny-to-make-it-up bit. After being impressed by the Kenwood XR-1800P loudspeakers here I wanted to use them, along with the ancient and weirdly good Vieta 6x9s with horn tweeters and 10in woofer-sized main drive magnets in my test rig to check out this amp. This rig has a VERY old Odyssey battery that now floats at just 12.01V, so I use the 10A marine charger into the DC system at the same time. The wires are by Stinger, the RCAs by JL Audio and bloody great huge distribution blocks by StreetWires. (Mind you, I have a Ground Zero deep cycle battery coming soon and a seriously sexy set of new battery hardware that will do away with my needing to use the multimeter all the time as it has a built-in Volt meter.) I plugged up the Clarion amp and powered it up. The Vietas were running but only one channel of the Kenwoods. This is a pain as the rig is well made and solid but has various places the no-sound-in-one-channel thing can mean a break at. So I start the diagnostics and am ready to totally de-install the speaker, when I discover I had not plugged the bloody box in correctly! Moral victory as my install wiring efforts were sound! But the whole rig sound thin and weedy. So I de-phased one pair and ran it ALL inside-out but in correct relative phase. And then I knew
That the amp was a peach.
I messed about, I cranked it up and down, tried the crossovers and found they are best for keeping highs out of subs at this level. For I had BIG speakers. If you have fives or fours or even worse, punchy little threes to drive, then you would use the 30 to 300Hz cross points at around 60Hz or even higher as highpass.
In the event, I turned it all down. Lifted the main gain, turned off the 6dB of bass boost I had been playing with and set the two sets of channel gains to balance the system nicely, then cranked the level back up.
It was as good as any rig I have used, in many ways. The bass was richer than any set I have used before as they are ridiculous sevens and the plastical cleverness adaptors are amazingly complex shapes. My house was empty so I played three tracks from a disc I adore and since I was feeling a bit sad for a personal reason (a friend, rather than family) I danced like a total loon as if no one could see me. Just got lost in it.
Which is what it is all about. Yet I know that after the ‘I think I detect an emotional response, Captain’ you will want more than emotion.
So, it is fast. Really fast. The little sweet edges to sounds and things like tinkly bell trees in the background can easily become congested but NOT through this Clarion XR-2420 amp. That I had such good speakers and a nice clean source the resident Pioneer P88RSII, meant I could actually listen to the amp itself. I was able to overdrive it and as it got pressure, it very slowly and gently went into a harsher, clippy sound. But set at a decent level and allowed some headroom instead of stupid use, it was able to absolutely shake the place with that 480w peak it referred to on the box. This really does sound gorgeous and the bass boost works well, although the 12dB would be daft in my humble as the 6dB point is still asking for quadruple the energy.
The tonal balance was good, with none of the slightly rougher edge you ca get on a cheaper class D hammer-in-a-box product. Yes, a four channel amp to play silly huge sets of speakers is easy to find from a not-Nipponese outfit but with the Clarion, you get a particular purity of approach that is especially theirs. They do not BRAG about their SQ, rather accepting that it is paramount to their story and while in the UK, we respect them, I have always felt that our market’s inability to ever afford much of their madder-end output that HXD2 CD player and their incredible-looking Addzest 32 inch woofer (yes no fib!) has kept their rep held back. For the simple truth is that for the money asked, this utterly poots the big breeze onto a slew of other product. This is prettier, better sounding and plain more delicious in musicality than a serious collection of non-Japanese brands I would not dare name here! It has to be said that all the big Japanese makers have made some seriously good amps in their time. Kenwood carved a legend with their 1023, Sony had ES, Pioneer ODR and PRS, Alpine F#1 Status and latterly PDX, so there is precedent there.
Yet this is remarkable. If you do care about sound quality and want a snidely culty cool amp, then this joins that utterly underrated-in-its-own-lunchtime club with the absurdly good Alpine PDX amp, as a really good piece of kit that is easy to use, tolerant of even less than 10V DC as well as having smart look and a dirty great blue LED as the only flashy lighty.
Happily recommended by Talk Audio.
Pretty and clever.

Full Specifications
– Maximum power output : 480W
– Power @ 4 Ohms : 60W × 4 (THD – < 1%, 20Hz to 20kHz, into 4 Ohms, @14.4 Volts, all channels driven)
– Power @ 2 Ohms : 90W × 4 (THD – < 1%, 20Hz to 20kHz, @14.4 Volts, all channels driven)
– Bridged @ 4 Ohms: 180W × 2 (THD – < 1%, 20Hz to 20kHz, @14.4 Volts, all channels driven)
– Intermodulation Distortion: < 0.1%
– Signal To Noise ratio (A-weighted) > 80dB
– Channel Separation > 60dB
– Frequency Response: 20Hz to 30kHz full range
– Input Impedance: 22kOhms
– Allowable battery voltage: 9.6 to 15.6 Volts
– RCA & Speaker Level input
– FUSE: 2x 30A
– Input sensitivity: 200mV to 5.5 Volts on LINE level, 400mV to 11 Volts on SPEAKER level
– Number of channels : 4/3/2
– MOS-FET power supply
– Soft-start muting to prevent turn-on thump.
– Selectable bass boost; 0/6/12dB @ 50Hz with High-Q or narrow frequency band lift
– Two Independent Front/Rear adjustable frequency, High/Low pass electronic crossovers (4-channel), 30-300Hz 12dB/Octave
– Gold Plated Connectors; RCA/speaker/power
– Speaker level input : 4-channel
– Dimensions (W × H × D) (approx mm) 354 × 55 × 216
– High quality output with premium cosmetics
– High quality bi-polar output transistors for natural sound
– Oversized power capacitors for reserve current during transient peaks.
Technology